Destination: Destinations

A great day to travel from Peter-
borough: everything running to
schedule!

With a recent Great Rail Journey brochure came a pair of free tickets to the Destinations travel show at Olympia. I thought this might be a good show to see as we could meet tour operators and agents face-to-face and also might have ideas for future travel that we may not have had simply from advertising. Indeed, the opportunity to speak to Amtrak was worth the effort because I have at the back of my mind a one-off tour of the United States one day and it is worth investing some effort in the planning of this since it will be too expensive to return and do anything I regret missing! That plan, however, is another story!

There was no booking to do for the exhibition itself, simply completing the form on the back of the free ticket (giving them my details was effectively the price of the ticket, but that was OK because the details included ticking boxes for what interests me, so the hope is that I'll receive relevant advertising that I'll actually want to see). So, to the web to book the travel! As it happens, we have family living not far from Olympia so we could plan to visit after we had seen the exhibition, and then travel home later in the evening, after the rush had died down.

We always have to change trains at Peterborough on our way to London, and the train we get from there to London will depend upon which one has the best-priced First Class tickets available. We were in no hurry to get there and Peterborough station is well-located for passing time in the Queensgate shopping centre, and so we spent a little while in John Lewis between train before boarding our Virgin East Coast service to London: basically on a trip this short it is a 125mph coffee break, with included coffee, cake, biscuits and fruit! We generally take the bottled water as well and often take it with us because we are bound to need it at some point in the day, even if not on the train.

Not being in a hurry on this occasion we caught a bus to Olympia: the number 10 from Kings Cross serves much of the West End on its way to Hammersmith and is a route we often use. Although buses are supposed to be every few minutes on this route, we had to wait a long time, with our Bus Mapper app showing "due" for several minutes. There seemed to be some severe congestion somewhere and suddenly a flurry of eastbound buses arrived at Kings Cross to go round the block ready to head back to Hammersmith. We boarded the first and rode towards the front of the upper deck. This bus was terminated early after further delays owing to a roadworks diversion so we had to change buses at Marble Arch, but got to Olympia in the end, having see a lot more of London than we would have done on the Underground. Not the way to go if your journey is time-critical, though!

We visited all the companies we wanted to visit at Destinations, but we struggled with lunch: there simply were not enough catering facilities to cope with the number of visitors and we ended up with a take-away salad (very nice salad) sitting on the floor of the hall. Fortunately I was surveyed after my visit and was able to give a low score for customer satisfaction at Olympia, but the exhibition itself was good. They just need a decent place for it.

After we had seen all we wanted to see we visited family and then took the Hammersmith and City Underground line back to Kings Cross for the train home. A weekday, so a later train and a slicker connection at Peterborough and we were swiftly and comfortably home, with a tot of whisky on the train (included in fare) to round off the day.

A party in a brewery!

It has been more difficult to organise than popular culture would suggest, but I have managed to arrange a "booze up" in a brewery. Well, it is really a tour of the Grainstore Brewery premises but the package does include unlimited ale with the light meal afterwards, limited only by our need to catch the last train home ... and be allowed to board it.

This is the first of what I hope will be a revival of the railtours I have arranged for the people of All Saints, Stamford and their families and friends and which readers of the blog may have seen in the past. It takes place this Tuesday evening, 21st February, and you will be able to follow our progress on the usual Twitter feed @mwtrips, perhaps with your own pint of a Grainstore Ale to hand! We shall gather at Stamford station in time for the 18:05 train towards Birmingham; the brewery is in Oakham, just one station away from home in Stamford, and is immediately adjacent to the rail station, so access by train could not be easier.

Previous outings have been to Ely, York and Lincoln, and I am hoping to arrange trips to Canterbury, Spalding and Wainfleet in the not-too-distant future.

In search of Neptune

We had reached a crisis with our domestic tables policy: not a crisis as the news media tend to use the word, but a proper crisis in the sense that a decision was required. One of our tables was in almost permanent use holding up my model railway, the other (a) did not really suit our current or immediate future homes, (b) was old and tatty and (c) was not long enough for big family occasions unless the other could be got out from under the model railway - which was increasingly difficult as the layout grew heavier and I grew older. A very good, very extendable (and very expensive) table which would answer all these points was available to order from John Lewis in Peterborough but they did not actually have one on display. The manufacturer, Neptune, however, had a showroom in Bury St Edmunds ...

So began the plan for a one-day adventure in Suffolk. Train times were sought, maps consulted and Trip Advisor consulted for restaurants. The allocated day dawned bright and sunny, which made for a perfect day out.

Our connecting train from Ely to Bury St Edmunds

Our local train service would take us to Ely where we could change for Bury, although the service to Bury is only currently every two hours, so we had to plan when to leave. There is another service between Bury St Edmunds and Cambridge, where our local train also call, so I planned a mini-tour entailing going via the shorter route from Ely to Bury and returning via Cambridge. Fares, especially with our Senior Railcards and off-peak, were very reasonable, all the trains ran to time and apart form having to stand between Cambridge and Ely on the way back were very comfortable. The station at Bury St Edmunds is on the edge of the town centre and quite convenient for our purposes.

Walking from the station through the streets I managed to purchase a pair of jeans before very long and then following the map on my iPhone found the Neptune furniture showroom, recently adapted from a disused factory. We greatly enjoyed looking at everything, our choice of table was confirmed and we planned to spend far more than we could ever afford on a refitted kitchen when we retire - a plan that would rely on us winning the pools.

A town square with cathedral beyond. This was once a main
highway

Lunch was a disappointment: we had found a top class restaurant on Trip Advisor, looked at its website and decided to treat ourselves to a special lunch only to find that it was closed for a week for redecoration - a detail their website did not mention. So we had a very nice, but rather more workaday lunch at the Cathedral which we wanted to visit anyway. We had visited St Edmundsbury Cathedral before, but it has only recently been completed and we had not seen it since its completion. We then spent a little while looking at the fascinating town centre and further shops, but there were no further bargains to match my jeans ...

And so back to the station for the train to Cambridge, thence home. We changed trains at Cambridge in the peak hour, so it was not surprising that I had to stand for a while, but the crowds soon thin out at Ely and it was not a significant problem.